Arnold Zwicky
Arnold Zwicky is a linguist who coined the term frequency illusion in a post on the Language Log blog dated 7 August 2005. The Oxford English Dictionary added the term in its March 2019 update with a 2005 citation drawn from that post.
Who they are
Zwicky is a linguist who writes about language for a general readership, and the term for which this site cites him comes from that writing. His post Just Between Dr. Language and I appeared on Language Log on 7 August 2005. In it he discusses beliefs about language that people hold with confidence, including the recency illusion, the belief that a word or construction is new when it has long been in use, and a companion effect that he names the frequency illusion.
Key papers
Zwicky, A. (2005, 7 August). Just between Dr. Language and I. Language Log. The post is a blog entry and not a journal article. It is the source the Oxford English Dictionary cites for the term frequency illusion.
Key ideas
Zwicky proposed that once people notice a phenomenon, they register nearly every instance that crosses their path, and their estimates of how often it occurs drift upwards. He called this a selective attention effect. His illustration was the quotative use of the word all, which was said to be constant in the speech of some of his students' friends and turned up rarely in recorded and transcribed conversation.
Sources
- Zwicky, A. (2005, 7 August). Just between Dr. Language and I. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html.
- Zimmer, B. (2019). Frequency illusion in the OED. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42180.